hackingbear writes: The Financial Times reported that Taiwanese manufacturing giant Foxconn, China’s largest private sector employer with 1.2m mainland workers, is preparing genuinely representative labour union elections in its factories in China for the first time (free registration required), a powerful sign of the changes in the workshop of the world demanded by an increasingly restive workforce. This would be the first such exercise at a large company in China, where labour unions have traditionally been controlled by management and local government. “The position of chairman and 20 committee members of the Foxconn Federation of Labour Unions Committee will be determined through elections once every five years through an anonymous ballot voting process,” Foxconn said in response to questions from the Financial Times. After the Lunar New Year holiday this month, Foxconn, with the help of the Fair Labor Association, a U.S.-based labor group, will begin training its Chinese workers in how to vote for their 18,000 representatives.